Vote on the Scariest Food of 2010

From slimeburgers to oily oysters and salmonella-tainted eggs, 2010 kept dishing up yucky food news like a lunch lady gone postal. In case you’ve forgotten — put down that Four Loko, now! — we’ve rounded up the year’s 10 biggest scandals and travesties, including the very latest exposé from the Humane Society’s undercover investigators.

So tell us: Which of these were you most afraid to put in your mouth this year? Vote for the scariest — or click through the slideshow for explanations of our fears.

Photo: Forty PhotographsHamburgers Perhaps the risk of mad-cow disease, E. coli 0157, and antibiotic-resistant salmonella have already put you off burgers for life. If not, the news that 70 percent of U.S. ground beef contains a horror-movie mixture called “pink slime” should do the trick. WTF, you ask? Turns out a company called Beef Products has been buying pathogen-rich slaughterhouse scraps, dosing them with ammonia, and selling the resulting pink, slimy product as a “safer” burger-filler to industrial-beef purveyors — a horror-show Hamburger Helper. As the Times reported, the stuff doesn’t even work, possibly adding to the level of nasty bugs in burger meat. Well done, Big Beef!

“Corn sugar”Ah, high-fructose corn syrup, our old friend. What a year it’s been, no? Hard to believe that little more than 12 months ago, your sugar-daddy Corn Refiners Association’s multi-million dollar “Sweet Surprise” marketing campaign was in full swing and studies seemed to suggest HFCS really was no worse for you than table sugar. But then, a Princeton study revealed you aren’t as innocent as we thought, and we discovered that all that sweet talk about how you were chemically identical to table sugar was false — you have far more harmful fructose. Whoops! As sales dropped and the media turned bitter, what else to do but try for a fresh start? Still, even if you do succeed in changing your name to “corn sugar,” to us you’ll always be our favorite liver-rotting, body-tricking, bee-bamboozling, industrial-food additive.

Photo: John MurdenSchool lunchesLike many gross, painful things in life, the disgusting meals you ate at school have probably receded from memory. But this year, an anonymous teacher named Mrs. Q reminded the world just how scary school lunches really are, by snapping daily pics of the shrink-wrapped, nutritionally suspect, and generally depressing fare served at her school for her blog, “Fed Up: School Lunch Project.” We’d hoped her exposé might help inspire Congresscritters to invest in truly decent school lunches. Unfortunately, they had other priorities. As for Mrs. Q, tireless food figher that she is, she’s back on the front lines, eating in the cafeteria in solidarity with her students and penning daily accounts of the sad junk plopped on trays. Our monstrous school lunch system lurches on, and at least Mrs. Q makes sure it can’t hide the evil it does.

Photo: Liz LawleyGenetically engineered salmonAccording to the Chinese zodiac, 2010 was the year of the tiger, but we think of it as the Year of the Frankenfish. And no, we don’t mean that floppy senator from Minnesota. The FDA is still considering whether to approve a new kind of Atlantic salmon called “AquAdvantage,” engineered to grow faster with the
help of genes from the Chinook salmon and the eel-like ocean pout. It’s not the DNA tinkering that gives us the willies, though: it’s the agency’s rush to approve it in the face of misgivings of other government scientists and opposition from numerous consumer groups. Because once that salmon slips through, other GE animals like the Enviropig are bound to come lurching after.

Photo: Claudia WedellGulf seafoodCall us retro-’80s nerds, but we still dig the whole “blackened” fish thing. However, we’d prefer the blackening come from the spice shaker — not from a massive, weeks-long, world-historical oil spill right in the midst of our nation’s most productive fishery. Frankly, that scares the hell out of us, as did BP’s dodgy practice of piping in gushers of chemical dispersants to “control” the uncontrollable spill. The government swears the seafood now coming out of the Gulf is OK — and just shipped in 2,000 pounds of Gulf seafood for holiday receptions to prove it ain’t scared. No doubt the feds and their scientists are diligently testing Gulf seafood, but as NRDC shows, the tolerance levels they use for carcinogenic pretrochemical traces is likely too low. Care for an oyster-Four-Loko shooter?